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We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

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Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#121

Post by antics »

devcpp wrote: post #115
antics wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi OP. Your points, as I understand them, are the following. Correct me if I'm wrong. * MS is not a good example of a strong engineering org. Further, it is not a good example because Windows sucks. * Google doesn't employ every smart person ever. * Google can't actually compete. (ed note: in any field, or just against iOS and Fb?) * My argument is like the argument that no one would supplant Windows. * Given enough…

You make some good points but you lost me there: >Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores…

Hey devcpp, let me see if I have your points right.

* Windows actually sucks.

* Reinventing the wheel is not worth talking about no matter what.

* Bing sucks.

* I should admit the shortcomings of MS.

Regarding the last point, I'm kind of shocked that you think I'm a shill. I feel like I've been pretty honest about my feelings.

re: Windows sucks, that's sort of OT, but if you want to have the discussion, drop me a line. clemmer.alexander@gmail.com

re: Bing sucks, I don't see what your point about market share or unoriginality is, I already conceded that we have a lot of work to do with search relevance. I'm sort of annoyed about the negativity of your post, as from my perspective I've been pretty candid about what I think our strengths and weaknesses are. :(

re: reinventing the wheel, I don't think this is going to be something that we agree on. The way in which engineers here pull together and simply build what needs to be built is nothing short of breathtaking. I don't see how building, e.g., Cosmos shouldn't be considered an accomplishment. Should Amazon's Dynamo? What about Yahoo's Hadoop? What about anything in OSS, for that matter? I think you're not being fair here.

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#122

Post by namenotrequired »

teddyh wrote: post #45
gradys wrote: post #15

I would say that Bing already is a viable alternative. Having used it for several months now, there aren't too many queries that it doesn't handle well, and usually when I check Google's results for those queries, they are equally bad.

So instead of an entrenched monopolist, I’m supposed to choose… Microsoft? That just feels wrong .

Personally, I will try gradys suggestion because I need to use several google products for work; I know Microsoft is just as bad as Google but at least it's not Google, so they'll both only have more partial data.

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#123

Post by arikrak »

Yes, search is hard. Look how most websites that build a search for their own site still do a worse job than Google's site search. And its not like people haven't tried to take on Google. Google always faces the threat of companies succeeding in smaller areas of search, but so far it's dealt with those pretty well too. The other threat it faces is a (big) company developing an alternative approach, e.g IBM Watson.

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#124

Post by namenotrequired »

gesman wrote: post #67

One of the viable venues to compete with Google is not by developing "new, better search engine", but rather "better vertical platform". What's the best search engine where buyers go? Not google.com and never really been google, it's amazon.com and ebay.com. What's the best search engine to find answers on technical questions? Stackoverflow.com is approaching google very fast. So the answer would be for sharp minds t…

So perhaps, what a new search engine should do is figure out what you want to find, and search for it in whatever fits the vertical?

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#125

Post by namenotrequired »

lubujackson wrote: post #98
gesman wrote: post #67

One of the viable venues to compete with Google is not by developing "new, better search engine", but rather "better vertical platform". What's the best search engine where buyers go? Not google.com and never really been google, it's amazon.com and ebay.com. What's the best search engine to find answers on technical questions? Stackoverflow.com is approaching google very fast. So the answer would be for sharp minds t…

That's exactly what my startup is trying to address - how do you help users navigate 100, 1000 or even a million search engines? Ultimately, you need a way to browse search engines by topic and bundle them into custom lists for your specific needs. It's early going, but check Nuggety out if you're interested: http://nuggety.com/

I'm interested, but I've checked the front page and am still confused what / who it's for, could you clarify?

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#126

Post by fspeech »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #89
antics wrote: post #87

The comments here about building search engines that viably compete with Google in terms of quality are hilariously wrong. Hilariously wrong. The dominating cost is not hiring smart people to work on the problem, it's hiring enough smart people to work on the problem. Consider. Here at Microsoft, we employ a search relevance staff of -- what, 20% the size of Google's? And Google's engineers are rock solid. MS might b…

This. When you do build a competitive search engine and you see how much money Microsoft has put behind theirs to essentially no avail (how many times have angry shareholders tried to get them to kill it off?) you start to realize a key fact. If you want search engine competition you have to take Google's Ad business away. Its weird I know but Google's search ads pay $80 - $100 RPMs and other guys ads pay $30 RPMs. I…

It is not clear that agency is the issue here. The search ad business is a long-tail business. People who read and comment on HN, who understand how search works, likely are heavy users of search yet contribute little revenue. But hackers are important to Google in other ways because they are the tech trend setters who turned Google into a verb and told their computer-illiterate brethren to just "Google" it. Now just imagine what some of those less literate, who believe in palm reading or tarot cards, would think when faced with a computer that appears to half read one's mind. I mean these are the real gold mines that the ads people are looking for. And once they get comfortable they are not just going to switch based on some technical merits they've never even heard of and the ad market will continue to pay more to those who can deliver more of the "gold mine" type users.

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#128

Post by GoodIntentions »

jpdelatorre wrote: post #40

Here's an idea... how about instead of using just one search engine website, browsers will have a functionality that allows you to search for something and have it query to 3 different search engine at the same time? Users can configure which 3 search engine he/she wants to use. That way, website owners won't be so affected when one search engine screwed him up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile

I haven't used dogpile in forever - actually thought they were defunct, but your comment brought it to mind. Seems like what you're after?

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#129

Post by bvirkler »

rogerbinns wrote: post #57
sigil wrote: post #44

Is PageRank really the indomitable tech of our generation? Nobody can do better algorithmically, or integrate some kind of crowd sourced feedback, or measure browsing time and habits, or simply hand tune some of the most competitive key phrases? I’m sure I’m oversimplifying, but I wonder if we haven’t all been hypnotised by the complexity, much of which is marketing hype... Actually, the tech is extremely complex, an…

> Even then, is DDG viable competition ... An irritation for me with DDG is them formatting result URLs incorrectly, and then ignoring any feedback about it. Two examples are them adding spurious www. prefixes to Google code results, and leaving out slashes when creating Apple developer URLs. DDG could distinguish themselves by playing bazaar to Google's cathedral, but they don't appear to. A search engine that uses…

Scour (http://scour.com) has been trying to make a go of "social search" for a while.

Re: We Need Viable Search Engine Competition

#130

Post by samirahmed »

devcpp wrote: post #115
antics wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi OP. Your points, as I understand them, are the following. Correct me if I'm wrong. * MS is not a good example of a strong engineering org. Further, it is not a good example because Windows sucks. * Google doesn't employ every smart person ever. * Google can't actually compete. (ed note: in any field, or just against iOS and Fb?) * My argument is like the argument that no one would supplant Windows. * Given enough…

You make some good points but you lost me there: >Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores…

> Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search

why do you believe this? Have you used Bing and given it a fair chance?

The Bing search you see has differentiated itself from Google in many ways with Twitter/Linkedin/Facebook/Yelp integration.

Bing Image search's format has been copied by Google. Bing search in windows 8 is a different experience to Google Search on android.

> Market Share at 20%

Bing search, with the yahoo searchs that it powers constitutes over 30% of the market share of US market.

Furthermore, Bing serves as the backbone for much of the ML, NLP and IR that occurs across MSFT.

Change your chrome's default search to bing, and you will be suprised by the things it does differently, it changed my perspective (http://blog.samirism.com/experiments/bing-experiment.html)

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